Custom Smartlinks with Derek

It’s been almost 3 years since we’ve introduced our Smartlink feature. Since then, we’ve helped countless affiliates boost their online revenues by matching their traffic with our top-converting offers.

Today, you’re in for a treat as we delve deeper into this important tool and learn more about its inner workings and the man behind all the magic!

What are smartlinks?

In short, smartlinks represent a rotation of optimized offers affiliates can choose instead of managing offers from each vertical themselves.

They take the form of multiple links and campaigns that have already been optimized to generate more conversions by our dedicated team. All made possible thanks to a powerful algorithm that recognizes where your traffic derives, and then matches that same traffic with only CrakRevenue’s best-suited offers.

It’s as easy as plug & play! Advanced knowledge not required.

You send the traffic, and we then deliver!  

Here’s a great overview as to why smartlinks are a game-changer for affiliate marketing:

Turnkey Solution

One link is everything you’ll ever need to start making money online! Spend your time on what you do best: making your brand #1!

Auto-Optimized

The traffic you send is automatically optimized so you’re always getting the highest conversion rate possible—and therefore more money!

Convert any and every GEO

Smartlinks are designed so all of your trafic, regardless of country, gets monetized. No more lost traffic!

Higher payouts

The volume and traffic quality we maintain on smartlinks ensures you’re always getting the highest payouts on the market—and the highest EPC!

Only top offers

Every offer is A/B tested to the max so you only convert on the best offers with the best landing pages for your traffic! We take the risks, you reap the rewards!

Responsive design

Every click is sent to responsive landing pages so you get the best results, be it coming from a desktop, a tablet, a smartphone or even a smart TV!

Who is Derek?

If you’re a CrakRevenue regular, you’ve likely heard the name “Derek” at some point. After all, he’s the famous narrator behind our FreeCamsExposed (FCE) video guide landing pages for MyFreeCams.

But today we’re going to turn our attention to another Derek who’s been working with us for just over a year now. In fact we managed to snatch him away from his computer so he could tell us more about himself and walk us through what smartlink optimization looks like - from the inside.

Hello everyone! My name is Derek Paquet and I’m the Smartlinks Product Manager here at CrakRevenue.

Both my education and experience in business management and ecommerce have been instrumental for this position.

Analyzing stats and making sense of the numbers is my greatest strength. My main goal is to increase revenues for affiliates and optimize, which I do by sharing my insight, bringing the numbers to life.  One of my core values is communication: I like to teach others on how to interpret numbers so that they know which mistakes to avoid.

All of these qualities make Derek an exceptional team player, whose job is central to ensure affiliates get more money with their hard-earned traffic. But how exactly does he optimize smartlinks?

How do you optimize smartlinks?

Choosing offers

Offers are chosen according to the overall performance of offers in any given vertical, which all have been tested multiple times with the traffic of thousands of affiliates plus our own, in-house media buy team.

Only the best offers end up in smartlinks. Another interesting fact is that some offers are only available in smartlinks.

Weighing offers

Each individual offer’s weight in our rotation is also deeply optimized—automatically so even according to the every minute EPC (live).

In this context, offer weight refers to the frequency at which an offer will be displayed to users. For instance, a 70/100 weight means the offer will be displayed to 70% of the clicks.

Setting offers’ payouts

We begin with pay per lead (PPL), but then switch towards pay per sale (PPS) and Revshare if offers perform greatly or if it’s more beneficial for affiliates who are using smartlinks (ex: payout bump). Part of my job is to manually make these choices on a daily basis.

EPC optimization

It’s interesting to note EPC optimization is based off results from our network of affiliates and not revenue generated by our in-house team of media buyers nor CrakRevenue’s margins for operational costs. In other words, the EPC is always optimized according to the most profitable offers and payouts for affiliates.

Why does your job yields better performance than an optimizer (software)?

To start things off, there’s no perfect optimizer for Smartlinks out there. Even the best of the bunch show significant variations on their performance, for instance when it comes to an offer’s payout or conversion rate.

Let me give you another example: say you have an offer with a big payout that only converts once every 10,000 clicks and another offer with a lower payout that converts often. The former can boost EPC, but lower revenues for lots of affiliates because only one conversion has been registered. However, the latter—with a slightly lower EPC—will see more affiliates generate revenues.

This is where my work really shines: I remove the traffic’s source from our smartlink and redirect qualified traffic from an affiliate to the offer with a bigger payout. Meanwhile, other affiliates’ traffic and remainder of the rotation stays with the lower payout offer that generates more conversions.

Furthermore, optimizers are often based off one single time frame without taking into account seasonality—only caring about the last 24 hours in most cases. What I like to do is compare smartlink performance in the last 7, 15 or 30 days while factoring in offers’ seasonality and brands’ lifecycles (for instance when an offer or creative starts to run out of steam). Indeed, freshness generates more interest during the first few months and, consequently, conversions.

The same applies for GEOs without lots of traffic: if we’d let optimizers base their performance only on the last 24 hours, nothing would be trustworthy and optimized. In this case, one single conversion can skew all results and disrupt its own rotation along the way.

What works best with smartlinks?

Smartlinks are designated to work with all types of traffic and with all GEOs. However, it’s true that some territories or promotion methods have had better results. Here’s what we found out:

What are custom smartlinks and how can I get one?

In brief, they’re smartlinks that have been optimized specifically for an affiliate’s traffic or traffic source with high volume of steady conversions—$500 USD and more per day in generated commissions on average.

When you have such a traffic source, it becomes well worth it to single it out and optimize the heck out of it. Doing so ensures better conversion rates and higher revenues for involved affiliates.

If you such traffic sources et don’t have the time to manage optimization yourself, don’t hesitate to ask for your own custom smartlink. Ask your affiliate manager for all the details!

If you need further proof that smartlinks are the real deal, know they’ve allowed us to increase the average EPC of traffic sources anywhere between 19 and 60%. This is compared to when affiliates dealt with optimization on their end, which shows just how much work smartlinks can do for you!

What does a normal day look like for you when you optimize custom smartlinks?

Here’s what I do each day when I work on custom smartlinks:

1. I do what I call a “checkup” in each vertical to ensure optimal performance everywhere
2. I do a mix of auto-optimization for each offer’s weight in our rotations and manual actions to choose which offers go where.
3. Each new offer is added in our rotations to test performance. Therefore, affiliates always have access to the latest offers, without the need of special actions on their part.
4. I take the time to optimize the best GEOs (per total revenue) for our biggest smartlink whales, which results in better performance and stability for them.

Curious to know what my proven work method actually translates into? Have a look!

How can affiliates help you at your own job?

I’ll be honest: affiliates who give me a lot of information about their traffic have it best!

Here’s how you can make it easier for me… and yourself!

• Tell me how exactly are you promoting your offers? This includes funnels, banners, traffic type, etc.
• Give me some time. Patience is a virtue, and with data-driven services it’s even more true, we need to analyze performance before getting back to you.
• Send quality traffic. One surefire way to give me a hard time is if you use the words “free” or clickbait/fake news to artificially inflate your numbers. We want more qualified customers, not less!
• Tell me everything about performance on other networks and which offer types you used: dating, cam, VOD, PPS, PPL, Revhare, the list goes on.

I hope you learned more about custom smartlinks today. It sure is a wonderful tool at your disposal and I urge you to use them whenever you can. Feel free to comment on your experience below. Until next time!